WEDNESDAY: The Toasters skank it up at the Ottobar with Bumpin’ Uglies and The Evokatones. Texas chamber rock ensemble Mother Falcon performs at the Patterson Theater. Local punk trio Canker Blossomplays the Sidebar with The Sharp Lads and Professional Victim. Don’t miss: Local MCs Butch Dawson and Drew Scott open for Cage at Baltimore Soundstage.

-Kwanzaa Celebration: At a time when some stubborn people maintain that Santa, the fictional character made to inspire love and joy and commercialism, can only be white--looking at you, Fox News--African heritage takes its rightful place during the...

The only thing I love more than a good coupon is a membership card. I remember gazing longingly at the ads in my Archie Double Digest as a kid, the ones that promised a four-color button along with a shiny new membership card. I mean, who doesn’t want to be a member, with the card to prove it? I started amassing Baltimore-based cards before I even moved here, just to get myself ready, and I showed up in town with membership cards to the Maryland Historical Society, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of...

The irony was lost on no one, least of all Dr. Helena Hicks.
“Those white people who were with me suddenly got a taste of what it was like to be barred from a public building,” she says. “They got a rude awakening. Especially from a bunch of black guards.”
Hicks, a longtime civil rights figure best known for a 1955 sit-in at the former Read’s Drug Store, was coming to take her place on a panel discussion at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of African-American History on Oct....

The executive director of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum held a press conference today to explain why he barred a local civil-rights activist from a panel discussion she had been invited to last week.
“I have no ill will toward Dr. Hicks,” Dr. Skipp Sanders told reporters after a half-hour of taking questions. “I just wanted to ensure . . . civil and tolerant behavior.”
A story in this morning’s Baltimore Sun recounted events leading up to Dr. Helena Hicks’...

Beware getting too attached to Baltimore, as doing so may ruin your love of anyplace else. It happened famously to the late poet Ogden Nash, who, in explaining why he and his wife cut short their Manhattan residency to return to her hometown, wrote, “I could have loved New York had I not loved Baltimore.” This syndrome may have hindered some promising careers, while helping others, like David Simon’s and John Waters’, but it makes moving to or visiting Mobtown akin to flirting with...